If your family has any sons, they automatically marry and start making children

If you have a daughter, then from time to time you will recieve a message showing the profile of a potential husband for her. If you feel that he is worthy enough, you can accept him into your family (and start making children ). If you feel that he is not, then sucks for him.

All family members grow older, you cannot stop that, obviously.

To develop your family members' personalities, give them some good traits. To give someone good traits, make him win battles often, and/or have him be educated in a city with an academy.

But not all your male family members will marry. Some of them just refuse to do so and stay single. It can be quite frustrating at times.

It is possible to alter the chances of marriage by keeping the suitor in a suitable city. I have not verified this, however. But you can definitely increase the fertility of males (offspring) with things like medical ancillaries, which can be swapped from others, or gained through academies, for instance.

However, my campaigns are almost always quick, and so the way I prefer to increase the family is by adopting... in particular, men of the hour. I like to keep my approx 2/3 rule at quota (e.g., the game allows you a number of generals which is about 2/3 of the number of cities, all other things being constant). An advantage is that these adoptions almost always have good traits, or no bad ones. You will build your own through their courage and victories.

Men of the hour are usually good generals, but usually nave no governing skills. Bug Fixer helps with this, by allowing an academy to be a trigger building for useful skills that could otherwise only be got at birth (Intelligent, Mathematics Skill etc.)

It turns out that that particular bug is negligible in almost all games I have played, because my own playstyle is to conquer rapidly. A partial consequence is that rarely ever do I have a general in a city, unless its someone assigned to tend the Athens-Corinth-Sparta slave, build & trade cycles (e.g., with traints and/or ancillaries which discount slaves, units, or buildings... or grants trade bonuses).

My generals gain what, for me, are good governing skills... the green wreaths of influence... in battle. The scars can negate that somewhat, though. Management usually suffers, but since they don't do much managing, welllll. But usually I do meet the 6789 rule... by year 6 or 7 have several 8- or 9-star generals.

About Bug Fixer, I have not personally tested this, but I have seen good things about it. I will likely give it a shot in the next week or two.

Definitely go for it. I left Cornelius Brutus in Athens, because he had about 3 wreaths. After 5 years, he had 10 and a huge trade bonus - the guy was worth 1000 denarii a turn just sitting there.

[This message has been edited by yakcamkir (edited 11-24-2005 @ 05:24 PM).]

Athens is one of my exception cities; I posted about the uniqueness of it somewhere (I can't find the thread now), and a special general is put in charge as Governor... in a nutshell, ancillaries (combined from other generals) & traits to maximize high movement, good trade, good tax. This can also be the case in the core empire, depending on game point. So there might in fact be 2 and sometimes 3 or four cities I actually govern. Athens is almost always one, unless the General is needed to put out a nearby fire.